Reinvent to Reshape Your World
How to make changes for an immediate impact on your consumer's experience
By Ken Nisch -- Gifts and Dec, 12/1/2009 12:00:00 AM
You know the adage, "Don't put off for tomorrow what you can do today." In these challenging times, the answer is not to do less, but in many cases to do it more creatively, albeit with fewer resources. The place to start: View your business through the eyes of your most challenging customers.
If you romance these customers, they will become engaged with the experience of your store. They will become your best customers and the store's biggest advocates.
Begin with a Clean Slate
Sometimes, your critical eye becomes blurred or distorted by complacency, habit and operating fatigue. Like old-fashioned spring cleaning, it works best when starting fresh with a top-to-bottom attitude and a clean slate. We often suggest, only half jokingly, that the best first step is to literally, or at least figuratively, "drag everything out to the parking lot." This includes the merchandise, fixtures, props and visuals that have been accumulated over the years — and don't forget to include your preconceptions and old ideas. By accomplishing this proverbial "dragging out," you can begin to look at things in a new way. Think back to how many times you have reached into your closet and became newly re-acquainted with that pair of shoes you forgot you had, or found two or three items that you put together in a new way with a sense of renewal and freshness, all while enjoying a moment of self congratulation for your thrift and creativity.
Create a 'Fundamental' Plan
Rethinking your store in the same manner will provide not just a similar lift for yourself, but offer an important lift to both your most challenging and your loyal customers. Think how that might impact the undecided, who passing by, or better yet after stepping into the store, feel as if they have discovered a whole new place.
Before dragging everything back in, create a Floor Plan that is built on a number of "fundamentals" that we find are highly effective. (See the checklist above for easy reference.)
Build a Discovery Trail
The first step is to build a Discovery Trail. The Discovery Trail provides a path and a set of moments and events, whose pacing and rhythm assure the right level of interest and the equally important right amount of "white space" between these points of interest to engage, motivate and stop a customer at critical points within your store. This Discovery Trail does not need to literally be a hard surface "yellow brick road" that only serves to keep the customer's eyes on the floor versus on the merchandise. Rather, think of it as a series of impactful destinations where color, scale, unity of message or theme, or moments of whimsy and drama are provocative enough to provide the visual and creative stimulation to pull a person from point-to-point.
Retailers often make the mistake of putting all the best upfront with little attention paid to the back of the store. By properly pacing the points along a Discovery Trail you can assure the productivity and circulation of the entire store, enhancing an area's sell-through and providing customers with a better sense of destination through the use of all your valuable square footage, not just the front third.
To enhance the Discovery Trail's leverage are a variety of other merchandising and display tools. They include Amplification, Interrupters, Strikepoints, Focal Walls and Neighborhoods.
Amplification Creates 'Wow'
Amplification generally uses merchandise to maximize the impact through visual techniques.
Amplification can be created through color, use of geometry or the bringing together of categories in order to create major color blocks, rather than a more fragmented approach. Amplification can be a successful device in helping orient non-shoppers, or impress core consumers through the depth and authority of the category. But with all this order, structure and logic, do not be afraid to "mix it up" with a bit of the unexpected as well.
Interrupters Add Focus
An Interrupter is a fixture display that is defined by its singular focus or simplistic price points, such as a $1.99 price point display or singularity in point of view (Father's Day gifts). It needs a primary position, and can either be departmentally based or ganged into a group of complementary offers. The fixture is typically generic, portable, storable, and can be used with a variety of products through a variety of configurations. Interrupters are an effective way to create incremental sales. These are best placed in ways that, while they do not inhibit flow, essentially become "pebbles in the stream" with a fairly confined scale, singularity of merchandising and purpose, and a seasonal or topical clarity that allows them to become an easy add-on. Among the key criteria for creating a successful Interrupter are a link to immediate gratification, a sense of humor or an emotional connection that immediately clicks with the consumer. Spring flowers on a late winter day, a luscious display of dark chocolate or even an item such as monogrammed stationery where the customer makes an immediate connection with the personalized nature of the product all would be successful.
Group Fixtures as Strikepoints
Strikepoints are often supported with graphic messaging; an offer that may address lifestyle, end use, holiday, designer origin or theme. They provide consumers with an idea, whether it is for fashion, home goods or essential and impulse items related to an activity. Strikepoints act as a key contributor to the store's image and visual merchandising character in their role as a selling display. They also serve as a priority focus from an in-store maintenance and display perspective, given their highly visible location and important role. These fixtures typically bring together key basics with accent and layering pieces, receive specialty highlighting auxiliary lighting, and are maintained through clear communication to ensure that the investment in time, inventory, and in-store resources is constantly returned.
Focal Walls Create Impact
Focal Walls tend to be located at the end of key aisles or at the back of departments with internal merchandising zones, and are areas where the floor, finishes, color, and graphics are typically intensified to draw attention
These areas receive auxiliary lighting, are merchandised intentionally, providing continuity in areas (color, scale and presentation, value of items) where sufficient inventory will exist to maintain the Focal Wall positioning throughout the majority of the selling period. Focal Walls are key areas that create renewability and impact in areas (featured promotions, holidays, etc.) while creating a bold rhythm throughout the store.
Neighborhood Cross-Selling
Stores are like communities. Those that work are desirable, have a sense of place and personality; while others are faceless, mindless, common and boring. The best Neighborhoods have a sense of continuity and variety, are definable by their activities — the main street, the commons, etc. — and have an intuitive sense of flow. Some areas are quiet and peaceful; others are busy and exciting.
Neighborhoods have landmarks that lead you from one place to the other and bring people together around common interests through an easy exchange of conversation ideas and sociability and provide places for chance meetings and connections. A great store encourages these same "moments," which persuade the customer to stay longer, look with more intention and, depending on the arrangement and intent of the neighborhood, have a quick, easy in-and-out trip or one where entertainment and interactivity is part of their shopping trip.
After you have successfully moved your store from the "parking lot" into its new dynamic and engaging home (albeit with a few sidewalk sale items edited along the way), you can begin the plan for your next parking lot adventure. The next step is going to the upcoming gift show with your Floor Plan and Discovery Trail to buy products with a preplanned home, sense of theme and narrative that will even further enliven and support the journey you have created for your customer.
We would love your feedback!
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